Various modes of online advertising and mobile advertising are conventionally employed to select and serve an advertisement to a user. Examples of the modes of advertising include sponsored search, contextual advertising, and ads-in-apps advertising. In sponsored search, advertisements are associated with one or more keywords; further, the advertisements can be chosen when a search query inputted by a user includes at least a subset of the keywords associated with the advertisement. In contextual advertising, advertisements are selected based on content displayed to a user; thus, text of a web page displayed to the user can be scanned for keywords, and advertisements can be returned to the web page (e.g., to be displayed on the web page, as a pop-up advertisement, etc.) based on what the user is viewing. Moreover, in ads-in-apps advertising, advertisements related to an application (e.g., an application executed on a mobile device) can be selected and displayed in the application. Such modes of advertising are commonly based on a keyword driven model.
In a keyword driven model, advertisers typically bid on keywords in an auction and associate advertisements with one or more keywords, which are referred to as bid phrases. Ad networks oftentimes identify keywords relevant to a given context of a user and select corresponding advertisements for display to the user. The context, for instance, can be a web page, a source keyword, a search query, or an application (e.g., a mobile application, etc.) depending on the mode of advertising.
Performance of advertisements and audience engagement with the advertisements can depend on relevance of the keywords to the context and relevance of the keywords to a product and/or service offered in the advertisement. Accordingly, an ability to identify relevant keywords from contexts impacts performance of the advertisements and the audience engagement. However, since the context available for online advertising and mobile advertising is usually a short piece of text ranging from a phrase to a web page, multiple relevant keywords are typically unable to be extracted from the context.
Some conventional advertising approaches that employ a keyword driven model identify keywords directly from a web page, a source keyword, a search query, or an application and attempt to match the identified keywords to bid phrases on which advertisers are bidding. Yet, since such approaches commonly obtain a small set of keywords, few advertisers oftentimes participate in an auction which can result in a limited pool of advertisements. Moreover, relevance of the advertisements served to a user can be detrimentally impacted by having the limited pool of advertisements.